SETI Live

Exoplanet discoveries have been piling up faster and faster over the last decade, limiting announcements of new discoveries to the strange, unusual, and unexpected. One unexpected type of planet is the possible Hycean world -- hot, water-covered worlds with hydrogen atmospheres larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune with sizable habitable zones. With the addition of JWST's capabilities, previo...

Ask anyone interested in space science, and you will likely also find a person influenced in some way by science fiction, whether they grew up watching Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, watching movies, or reading books. The genre has grown and expanded over the centuries, reflecting and inspiring changes in the world, our technology, and even our dreams of exploration. Now, Ariel Waldman...

We follow up with SETI Artist in Residence Jonathon Keats about his project The Library of the Great Silence, an installation art project that addresses one of the implications of the Fermi Paradox. If the cosmos is only sparsely populated by intelligent beings that implies that at some point in their development almost all technological societies encounter a barrier they cannot cross. To counter...

An enigmatic cosmic entity has been consistently beaming radio waves to Earth every 22 minutes for over three decades, perplexing the scientific community. Identified as GPM J1839−10, this celestial body is believed to be a fading star emitting energy from its poles. Yet, intriguingly, its spin is so leisurely it seems implausible for its existence, marking it both incredibly stable and unusually...

SETI Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Daedelus imagines the first 10,000 days after first contact with an alien civilization and puts those imaginings to music. Daedelus calls this post-detection era the 'Xenopocene', which also serves as the title of their newly released album. In this conversation with SETI AIR Director Bettina Forget, discover Daedelus' creative process and what inspired them during t...

Tune in to this week's SETI Live broadcast, beamed directly from Devon Island in the High Arctic. This exceptional locale serves as a remarkable analog, mirroring key environmental features of both the Moon and Mars to help prepare for their exploration. Dr. Pascal Lee and his team have embarked on their annual expedition to study the local geology and microbiology, and their relevance to the Moon...

Frontier Development Lab (FDL) is an applied artificial intelligence (AI) research accelerator fostering collaboration among researchers, scientists, and engineers across diverse fields. FDL aims to address paramount challenges in space and Earth science through cutting-edge AI and Machine Learning applications. FDL is a collaborative effort of the SETI Institute, NASA, the Department of Energy (D...

In an unprecedented achievement, citizen scientists have set a new record for the SETI Institute and Unistellar, comprising the highest number of observers providing data on a single event. Amateur astronomers participating in the SETI Institute's and Unistellar's Cosmic Cataclysms program conducted a groundbreaking observation of supernova (SN) 2023ixf. The observations, which began just one hour...

We will present the first on-sky demonstration of the Fibered Imager foR a Single Telescope (FIRST) instrument at the Subaru Telescope. Using techniques of aperture masking and spatial filtering, FIRST combines the power of spectro-interferometry to deliver high contrast capabilities and spatial resolutions beyond the reach of traditional coronagraphic instruments. We will explain the 'pupil remap...

If an alien civilization wanted to communicate with other civilizations throughout the Milky Way, the galaxy's core holds potential as a strategic site for a beacon. Until now, radio SETI has primarily dedicated its efforts to the search for continuous signals. A new study sheds light on the remarkable energy efficiency of a train of pulses as a means of interstellar communication across vast dist...

Meet Adriana Knouf, our newest artist in residence! Adriana engages with topics such as wet media, space art, satellites, radio transmission, non-human encounters, queer and trans futurities, and machine learning. Join SETI AIR Director Bettina Forget and Adriana as they talk about her project TX-1, which has flown on the International Space Station, TX-2, an experiment in speculative satellite co...

Gravitational waves play a cosmic symphony as they pass through our galaxy. This week, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) Physics Frontiers Center released the results of 15 years of data in a set of papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. This research is the first evidence of gravitational waves at very low frequencies. The team, comprised...

The search for life beyond Earth received a slight boost from new research published in Nature this month. Scientists working with data collected by NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn discovered evidence of phosphates in ice particles ejected via cryovolcanism into the E-ring structure by the tiny moon Enceladus. Although a mere 500 kilometers in diameter, Enceladus is a huge target in the quest for...

Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, Director of the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center, joins us live from the Global Exploration Summit in Portugal. Last week Cabrol was co-author on a comment published in Nature Astronomy that explored the implications and potential scientific impacts on increased activity on Mars, specifically, human-crewed missions. How will the presence of people on Mars affect the search f...

NASA's JWST revealed a groundbreaking discovery about the true nature of main belt comets. The surprising presence of water in a main belt comet is challenging our understanding of the solar system's origins. The recent study of this enigmatic comet ignited intriguing questions about its composition, history, and potential interstellar origins. Join Mike Kelley, an astronomer from the University o...

A team of scientists and engineers from the SETI Institute, Impossible Sensing, NASA JPL, and other institutions will test their innovative robotic laser system on a deep-sea expedition aboard the E/V Nautilus. The mission, called InVADER (In-situ Vent Analysis Divebot for Exobiology Research), aims to advance technologies to explore, characterize and sample the seabed here on Earth. In particular...

There was a total solar eclipse in Australia on Thursday, April 20 (which was Wednesday, April 19 here in California). Join SETI Institute CEO Bill Diamond with Madhulika (Lika) Guhathkurta, PhD Senior Advisor for New Initiatives, GSFC/HPD Program Scientist/Heliophysics, NASA HQ. Lika is in Australia for the eclipse and will talk to us about what we can learn from this phenomenon and why eclipses...

A new NASA mission to Saturn's giant moon, Titan, is due to launch in 2027. When it arrives in the mid-2030s, it will begin a journey of discovery that could bring about a new understanding of the development of life in the universe. This mission, called Dragonfly, will carry an instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), designed to help scientists hone in on the chemistry at work...

As research teams around the world prepare for the launch of two separate missions to our 'sister planet' Venus, other scientists are spending their time looking through the data already collected by previous missions. Take, for example, the Magellan spacecraft, which mapped the surface of Venus from September 1990 through October 1994 using synthetic aperture radar. Last month, Science published...

Author and book designer Rebecca Demarest will be featured on this episode of SETI Live, along with astronomer and SETI Research Scientist Paul Dalba. The two will delve into the upcoming Exotopia expedition, an experimental sci-fi narrative that invites participants to embark on imaginary journeys to study extraterrestrial life on actual exoplanets within our galaxy. The forthcoming voyage will t...

When pondering the probability of discovering technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, the question that often arises is, "if they're out there, why haven't we found them yet?" And often, the response is that we have only searched a tiny portion of the galaxy. Further, algorithms developed decades ago for the earliest digital computers can be outdated and inefficient when applied to modern...

Astronomers learn about the universe by looking up, but the closest, most fascinating and most important (to us) astronomical object is below our feet. As we discover more and more planets in our galaxy, the importance of understanding and protecting our own "pale blue dot" becomes ever more critical. Join Professor Adrienne Cool, astrophysicist at San Francisco State University and founder of Ast...

The NASA DART mission impacted Dimorphos, the moon of near-Earth asteroid Didymos, on September 26, 2022, reducing its orbit by 33 minutes. Citizen astronomers around the world contributed crucial observations to quantify the impact's effects and understand our ability to alter an asteroid's path for planetary defense. Learn more from SETI Postdoctoral Fellow Ariel Graykowski on the implications f...

The Juno spacecraft launched on August 5, 2011, and arrived at Jupiter in 2016, where the mission began collecting data on the gas giant. In January 2021, NASA announced that the spacecraft's mission had been extended to September 2025. The extended mission's science campaigns expand on discoveries Juno has already made about Jupiter's interior structure, internal magnetic field, atmosphere (inclu...

New research suggests that a lack of a stable asteroid belt around these common, small, and cool stars may make their exoplanets less habitable for life. Join us in conversation with lead researcher Anna C. Childs to explore the implications of this research and the future of the search for alien life. Learn more about the most common type of star in our galaxy and the potential challenges in find...